seamus dubhghaill

Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

Tag Archives: Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh


by Leave a comment

Birth of George Francis Mitchell, Historian, Archaeologist & Educator

George Francis (Frank) Mitchell, FRS, HonFRSE, MRIA, environmental historian, archaeologist, geologist, and educator, is born on October 15, 1912, in Dublin.

Mitchell is the younger son of David William Mitchell, owner of a Dublin ironmongery and furniture business, and Francis Elizabeth Mitchell (née Kirby). His elder brother David becomes president of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (RCPI) and his sister Lillias is a noted weaver and teacher. He is educated at The High School, Dublin, and Trinity College Dublin (TCD), where he is a scholar in 1933 and receives a gold medal the following year. In 1934 he is appointed assistant to the professor of geology at TCD, and later is lecturer in geology (1940), reader in Irish archaeology (1959) and professor of Quaternary studies – a personal chair (1965). He is an efficient administrator and serves TCD successively as registrar, senior lecturer, and tutor, and after retirement is briefly a pro-chancellor of the university.

Mitchell’s major research focuses on the evolution of Ireland during the last two million years, particularly during the Quaternary since the retreat of the glacial ice over Ireland, and the effect man has had on this landscape. His interest in Quaternary studies begins in 1934, when he is appointed by the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) as an assistant to the Danish botanist and Quaternary geologist Knud Jessen, who uses the distribution of ancient pollen grains to reconstruct vegetational history. From 1940 he publishes a series of papers on topics such as the distribution of Irish giant deer and reindeer remains in Ireland, lacustrine deposits in County Meath, interglacial deposits in southeast Ireland, the palynology of Irish raised bogs, cave deposits, fossil pingos in County Wexford, bog flows, and the deposits of the older Pleistocene period in Ireland. His major study in this field is the documentation (1965) of the vegetational history of Littleton bog, County Tipperary, which has given its name to the present interglacial – the Littletonian warm stage.

Mitchell does not confine his studies to Ireland but also carries out work in Glasgow, Cornwall, and the Isle of Man. In 1957, he helps organise the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Dublin and is later chairman of the Geological Society of London sub-commission on British and Irish Quaternary stratigraphy, which produces a comprehensive report in 1973. He is a frequent broadcaster on radio and a prolific author of academic papers, and in later life writes several acclaimed books, including The Irish Landscape (1976), which goes through two further editions as Reading the Irish Landscape (1986, 1997), and a volume of semi-autobiography, The Way That I Followed (1990).

Although the recipient of many honours, Mitchell is modest about his achievements. He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) (1939), its president (1976–79), and Cunningham medalist (1989); president of the Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club (1945–46); Fellow of Trinity College Dublin (1945); president of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland (RSAI) (1957–60); president of the Royal Zoological Society of Ireland (RZSI) (1958–61); president of the International Union for Quaternary Research (1969–73); Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) (1973); founder member and later president (1991–93) of An Taisce; Boyle medalist of the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) (1978); pro-chancellor of Dublin University (1985–87); personal chair in Quaternary studies, Trinity College Dublin (TCD) (1965–79); honorary member, Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) (1981); honorary life member, Royal Dublin Society (RDS) (1981); honorary member, The Prehistoric Society (1983); honorary member, Quaternary Research Association (1983); honorary member, International Association for Quaternary Research (1985); and honorary fellow, Royal Society of Edinburgh (1984). He receives honorary degrees from Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) (D.Sc., 1976), the National University of Ireland (NUI) (D.Sc., 1977), and Uppsala University (fil.D., 1977).

Mitchell dies on November 25, 1997, in Townley Hall, County Louth.

In 1940, Mitchell marries Lucy Margaret (‘Pic’) (1911–87), daughter of E. J. Gwynn, provost of TCD. They have two daughters. For many years they live at Townley Hall, near Drogheda, County Louth, which had been TCD’s agricultural facility. A 1985 portrait by David Hone is displayed at Trinity College Dublin.

(From: “Mitchell, George Francis (‘Frank’)” by Patrick N. Wyse Jackson, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


by Leave a comment

Birth of George Francis FitzGerald, Academic & Physicist

Professor George Francis FitzGerald FRS FRSE, Irish academic and physicist, is born at No. 19, Lower Mount Street in Dublin on August 3, 1851. He is known for his work in electromagnetic theory and for the Lorentz–FitzGerald contraction, which becomes an integral part of Albert Einstein‘s special theory of relativity.

FitzGerald is born to the Reverend William FitzGerald and his wife Anne Frances Stoney. He is the nephew of George Johnstone Stoney, the Irish physicist who coins the term “electron.” After the particles are discovered by J. J. Thomson and Walter Kaufmann in 1896, FitzGerald is the one to propose calling them electrons. He is also the nephew of Bindon Blood Stoney, an eminent Irish engineer. His cousin is Edith Anne Stoney, a pioneer female medical physicist.

Professor of Moral Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin and vicar of St. Anne’s, Dawson Street, at the time of his son’s birth, William FitzGerald is consecrated Bishop of Cork, Cloyne and Ross in 1857 and translates to Killaloe and Clonfert in 1862. George returns to Dublin and enters TCD as a student at the age of sixteen, winning a scholarship in 1870 and graduating in 1871 in Mathematics and Experimental Science. He becomes a Fellow of Trinity in 1877 and spends the rest of his career there, serving as Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy from 1881 to 1901.

Along with Oliver Lodge, Oliver Heaviside and Heinrich Hertz, FitzGerald is a leading figure among the group of “Maxwellians” who revise, extend, clarify, and confirm James Clerk Maxwell‘s mathematical theories of the electromagnetic field during the late 1870s and the 1880s.

In 1883, following from Maxwell’s equations, FitzGerald is the first to suggest a device for producing rapidly oscillating electric currents to generate electromagnetic waves, a phenomenon which is first shown to exist experimentally by the German physicist Heinrich Hertz in 1888.

In 1883, FitzGerald is elected Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1899, he is awarded a Royal Medal for his investigations in theoretical physics. In 1900, he is made an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

FitzGerald is better known for his conjecture in his short letter to the editor of Science. “The Ether and the Earth’s Atmosphere” explains that if all moving objects were foreshortened in the direction of their motion, it would account for the curious null-results of the Michelson–Morley experiment. He bases this idea in part on the way electromagnetic forces are known to be affected by motion. In particular, he uses some equations that had been derived a short time before by his friend the electrical engineer Oliver Heaviside. The Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz hits on a very similar idea in 1892 and develops it more fully into Lorentz transformations, in connection with his theory of electrons.

The Lorentz–FitzGerald contraction hypothesis becomes an essential part of the Special Theory of Relativity, as Albert Einstein publishes it in 1905. He demonstrates the kinematic nature of this effect, by deriving it from the principle of relativity and the constancy of the speed of light.

FitzGerald suffers from many digestive problems for much of his shortened life. He becomes very ill with stomach problems. He dies on February 22, 1901, at his home, 7 Ely Place in Dublin, the day after an operation on a perforated ulcer. He is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery.

A crater on the far side of the Moon is named after FitzGerald, as is a building at Trinity College Dublin.


by Leave a comment

Birth of Sir Joseph Larmor, Physicist & Mathematician

Sir Joseph Larmor FRS FRSE, Irish and British physicist and mathematician who makes breakthroughs in the understanding of electricity, dynamics, thermodynamics, and the electron theory of matter, is born in Magheragall, County Antrim, on July 11, 1857. His most influential work is Aether and Matter, a theoretical physics book published in 1900.

Larmor is the son of Hugh Larmor, a Belfast shopkeeper and his wife, Anna Wright. The family moves to Belfast around 1860, and he is educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, and then studies mathematics and experimental science at Queen’s College, Belfast, where one of his teachers is John Purser. He obtains his BA in 1874 and MA in 1875. He subsequently studies at St. John’s College, Cambridge where in 1880 he is Senior Wrangler and Smith’s Prizeman and obtains his MA in 1883. After teaching physics for a few years at Queen’s College, Galway, he accepts a lectureship in mathematics at Cambridge in 1885. In 1892 he is elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and he serves as one of the Secretaries of the society. He is made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1910.

In 1903 Larmor is appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a post he retains until his retirement in 1932. He never marries. He is knighted by King Edward VII in 1909.

Motivated by his strong opposition to Home Rule for Ireland, in February 1911 Larmor runs for and is elected as Member of Parliament for Cambridge University (UK Parliament constituency) with the Conservative Party. He remains in parliament until the 1922 general election, at which point the Irish question has been settled. Upon his retirement from Cambridge in 1932 he moves back to County Down in Northern Ireland.

Larmor receives the honorary Doctor of Laws (LLD) from the University of Glasgow in June 1901. He is awarded the Poncelet Prize for 1918 by the French Academy of Sciences. He is a Plenary Speaker in 1920 at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) at Strasbourg and an Invited Speaker at the ICM in 1924 in Toronto and at the ICM in 1928 in Bologna.

Larmor dies in Holywood, County Down, Northern Ireland, on May 19, 1942.